I was in a new romance, my first one, and one that remained the most important of my romances for years to come. Marshall arrived slightly late but managed to catch my whole reading, sitting quietly off to the left-hand side. We barely knew each other, but the quiet support he showed me that night portended well for the relationship.

  It was the first time as an adult that I’d read aloud and read in front of an audience something that I’d written. I suppose as a child I had done some sort of reporting in elementary school, but I don’t remember standing in front of a podium with a poem or part of a short story. That night, when I finished reading my first poem, the audience clapped. Since they’d not offered the same reception to the previous few readers, my head swelled and glowed. I absorbed their sounds of laughter and their response to my words.

  I had read the anthology in the week previous and, without having met you, had decided that your story was my favorite in the book. You read well, but I remember more strongly meeting you afterward. You had a baseball cap on, wrapped around your closely shaven head, and I found myself staring into your eyes after approaching you to tell you that I admired your writing and had liked your story better than the others.

  You thanked me and returned the compliment. I wasn’t sure if you were sincere. Someone earlier had done the same to me. He’d told me how much he liked my story, and even though I wasn’t sure what I thought of his, I felt compelled to say the same. I wondered if you were doing what I’d done.

  You introduced me immediately to the person you were with, a gesture that I mistakenly took to mean that this was someone significant, a partner or boyfriend or whatever you would have called him. And truthfully, all that I remembered of that meeting was an intense attraction, and the notion that if I met you later in life, I would not know you by the distance between your brow and eyes or the angle between your lips and ears. I would know you by the attraction I felt, your eyes boring into me—at least that’s what I had hoped; your thoughts were probably much more innocent.

  I apologize that this story is about writers. A writer friend of mine says if he ever should write a book about writing, he will ask his boyfriend to shoot him. I nodded enthusiastically at the time, but now I’m not so sure. I mean, here I am, recreating the same crime described. I am telling you of that night, high on accomplishment and the attention, meeting this writer.

  If you are not another writer, which you may be (since many readers of short stories are writers of them as well), then I hope that you’ll transpose the experience to something more familiar. Like going to a conference and doing a presentation about something you are passionate about. Or joining up with a bunch of hobbyists, though I think that the stamp and coin collectors of yesteryear have mostly been replaced by people who are fans of certain TV shows or who dress up as large, fuzzy animals.

  But the analogy could be much simpler. Like when you and the kid down the street both got shiny new bicycles at the same time. You rode around, and the other kids in the neighborhood were impressed and jealous. You were happy to share the glory with someone else, the wind whistling in your ears, the smell of childhood in your nostrils.

  Between the first time I met you and the next time, seven years later, I had changed from a flirtatious but relatively chaste young lad into an experienced man of the world. This is in the comparative sense. Men get to parade that. If I were a woman, I’d be considered loose and sluttish. As a man: a Romeo, a Casanova, a stud? Well, not really: As a gay man, similar terms apply as to women, but I’ll wear them loudly like a Hawaiian holiday shirt. The words promiscuity and slut along with been around the block and sex pig instead of tropical birds and flowers.

  When I see you again, I do look at your eyes, but quickly scan downward at the more physical, the more carnal. I like what I see: a strong, gym-built body, with curves in all the right places. I also see that you dress as carefully as I do but probably carry it off better. I can still be a bit lazy with ironing and sometimes mix two genres without getting the right blend. You dress as hip young urban gay men do, the cut of your short-sleeve shirts being flattering but not skintight, the trousers being slightly baggy, a pair of knee-length shorts that a colleague of mine likes for below the fabric he can see your strong calves.

  Since they’ve been pointed out to me, I consider them as well. They’re strange things, the muscles of the calves. Round humps pushing out from the back of our lower legs, poised solidly but awkwardly above the ankles. They point out how thin our ankles really are and the strange way our weight above balances on so little below. Some calves are barely noticeable, like a thin vase of a nondescript color. Others are hard and muscular and showy. After meeting you again, and admiring the slope and curve of your calf muscles, I start to notice them on other men. I am suddenly aware of a body part that I’ve never really noticed.

  Another thing I found amusing about your calves is that their shapes were echoed at the top of your head. Not exactly the same curve, really, but my same desire to reach over and stroke them. Your legs. Your head, closely shaven. Your hair dark but light in weight and texture, so your crown was shiny and smooth, a strong form that accentuated your handsome features.

  I, on the other hand, had gone blond. It was something that I’d considered for a long time, but was detracted from doing so by the fact that I’d seen so many Asian men with odd glowing shades of orange on their heads and blond that wasn’t really blond. The story, my hairdresser had revealed, was that they dyed their hair at home. A professional job, bleached carefully with an expensive toner, would result in what I wanted.

  It did, a gesture that I found radically improved my sex life. The incongruity of an Asian with blond hair caused people to look at me a little more closely, and getting handsome men to look at me was certainly an advantage if I wanted to look at them.

  So we stood next to each other, a dyed blond and a shaved head, and I thought to myself that there was quite a bit of similarity in that. We were both writers (who had had stories and poems published in similar books and magazines) and I was fashioning in my mind the hopes of twinned desire: that you were attracted to me as much as I was to you. But the real twinned desire was evidenced by our hair, or lack of it. A desire to be noticed by others.

  I’ve left it behind, poetry, to write this. The sculpted form, careful placement, snappy one-liners. Instead I fall into the tumbleweeds of prose, my thoughts jammed up against each other like tenement houses. I dare to be sloppy, sloppier than poems at least.

  I read your latest poems and during any stanza about the body or sex, I imagined making love with you. The poems were variable. Like me, you could slip into describing sentiment rather than evoking it. That, and a tendency to overwrite, to use a phrase too literary or pretty for the image behind it. This we share in common. “Some of the poems are very old,” you’d said, handing your chapbook to me.

  Unlike me, you hold back. You can tell stories in a few words that allude to larger histories. Your short brushstrokes make do for a painting. When it works, it’s compact and haunting. You leave the poem alone, even if you might want to stay. I explain too much. You know this already.

  When I read your poems, I can’t always analyze them, though I know when you’ve hit your mark. Sometimes, I want more narrative, however—more connections between the poems themselves. I want to read twenty short prose poems about your last boyfriend and a dozen couplets about your current one. I want to insinuate myself into your skin so that you write one about me.

  We have met again at a conference. It’s impossible not to meet people at conferences, but it’s sometimes surprising when you’ve met them before in different lives. The first time I’d met you, I was studying political science, and you medicine. Years later, we are both working with AIDS, the virus that confuses and confounds us and mutates with each replication. It is not strange that we’ve both been drawn into the same arena.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” I ask, more interested in your personal than your professional life. I ask you about the man you were with the first time we met, and realize with some embarrassment that I have revealed my desire too early.

  “No, he was just a friend, never a boyfriend. I am seeing someone now. We live together.” You explain that he is a schoolteacher and kind and is called Mark.

  Later, I am still asking you about your personal life. “Do you have an open relationship?”

  When I came out in my early twenties and during travels to Europe soon after, I would never have asked this question. I asked instead, “Do you have a partner?” and if the answer was yes, no matter how close they sat next to me or how intently they stared into my eyes, I was breezy and amiable but gave no encouragement, nor understood that some may have been given. Monogamy was the only model I’d heard about, and if someone was attached it meant they weren’t available to me.

  Actually, I might have asked, “Do you have diplomatic immunity?” A joke that I pretend I made up but probably got from someone else, and that after a beat of incomprehension is always met with a slight laugh. D.I., as I call it, is different than an open relationship, because it only happens when one or the other partner is off traveling or at a conference or otherwise out of town.

  My questions are usually meant to be straightforward.

  You replied, “Well. Kind of.”

  “Kind of? What does that mean? You’ve either got it or you don’t.” I try to sound jovial so that I seem gently prodding rather than needling you.

  You look thoughtful but unperturbed, and change the subject.

  Our meetings that week are not worth reporting on. We see each other between sessions, ask how our presentations went, and manage a few times to have a meal together.

  I am fascinated by the layer of hair on your forearms, surprisingly dark, and a dusting of it on your calves (again, revealed below your knee-high shorts). Even with this evidence of hair, I’m thinking that you are quite smooth, perhaps a thin line between your groin and belly, or a patch between your pectoral muscles, reeds peeking up from soil after winter.

  I like a smooth body the best, I have to admit, the hand or tongue traveling unobstructed over hard surfaces. Clean like the skin of beluga whales or dolphins or even a pillowcase, my head pressed into it, the weight of a lover on my back, a pulsing, grinding rhythm.

  I have brushed up against your body at times, and think your torso is smooth. I know that your body is strong, and the weights in the gym have left the right kind of evidence that I, a faux-detective, must examine closely.

  Thank goodness the tension breaks regularly. When you speak, I’m jarred into a lesser fantasy. In my travels, I’ve managed to de-eroticize the Canadian accent. Its round, open, and earnest softness does little to make me hard. Its musical lilts are too familiar. They’re like someone in indecision or maybe like elevator music, not the swinging joke of a Glaswegian brogue or the low xylophone tones of a Caribbean parlance. It’s friendly and comforting and it calms me. It reminds me of friends but does not excite me. I’m glad that there’s something in you that I find lacking.

  Still, you don’t need to talk during sex.

  I’m happy to discover that you like foreplay as well. And after-play too, but we can get to that later. Some guys come in about as quick a time as I’m thinking of warming up. It’s not that I’m a slow starter. It’s that I like the tension to build. So, no clothes ripped off, no zippers and snaps burning your skin in their rush to flee you. This is about restraint: martini glasses filled with white chocolate mousse, and no one around anywhere. You could dip your finger in it and smooth over the indentation. Would anyone notice? Hold it in, hold it in, don’t spoil your supper.

  My mouth is watering as if I’m already swallowing you and I’m soiling your clothes with saliva, stains of wet at your nipple (if you are a woman, you could be lactating), at your crotch (like a teenager who fantasized too much, too quickly), at the hemline of your shorts (as if you were wading in the ocean).

  The small of your knee is wet; it echoes your salivating mouth.Articles of clothing get stripped off one at a time, and generally we take turns. I remove your shoe. Then another shoe. You remove my shirt. The process is interrupted because you cannot believe the size of my nipples, and have to check with your tongue to know if they are really that large and round. You suck on them, and a space just behind my temples starts to be drawn into the same suction. I unbutton your shorts. And then the buttons at your groin. We do not allow the other to undress himself. Certain procedures must be followed.

  Finally, both of us naked, it is like being born again. If we stopped to think about it. Which we do not do, since we’re occupied with each other’s senses and movements, textures beneath our hands. You suck cock as well as you write, and I try to show you my talents too. I put my tongue up your ass, milky white, hard and soft, a marble Italian statue come to life and writhing above my mouth. I have a weakness for strength, and you have it. There are so many muscles in your back, thighs, and shoulders. They shift constantly under my hands, as if I am the wooden bridge to Noah’s Ark and all manner of beasts—light, heavy, round, horned—are shifting over my walkway. While my mind tries to take in these various sensations, you add to the difficulty and press into me with human hands, tongue, arms, breath, cock.

  I have always fantasized about getting good at being fucked. So why not with you? There was something political about my objections in my early sexual career. I had a thing for older men, but just because I was with older and sometimes bigger men was not an excuse, I thought, for me to be penetrated and vulnerable.

  The various techniques of coercion also left me feeling that I didn’t really want it. “Please, please fuck me,” said one lover, on the night we were breaking up. When I grabbed the lubricant and condoms, he said, “No, I’d rather fuck you.” I straddled his stomach, jerked off in his face, and left the room. Others: “Oh, you’ll really like it,” “It’s easy, you just have to relax,” “I bet you’ve been waiting for it.”

  With other lovers, whom I felt more comfortable with, I tried. I mean, I really tried. We would foreplay endlessly, I would be rimmed as if I was a Chevy going through an automatic carwash, I had fingers up me like a Dutch dam in need of constant repair. But the moment of truth, when it came, the first time, and most of the next times: Ow! “You’ll get used to it.” Ow!

  One lover told me, “It hurt a lot at first, but when I got used to it, it became my favorite position. I can’t get enough of it. I sometimes can’t come if I’m not being fucked.”

  Hmm, this sounded good. “And how long did it take to get used to it?”

  “Well, it kind of hurt for the first two years, and then it was OK.”

  Two years!?

  Of course, other friends had no problems at all. “I’d been putting things up there as long as I can remember. Candles. Carrots. Lots of C things. It’s never hurt at all. Maybe try it on your side.” “Practice with a dildo,” recommended another, who was giving advice from personal experience. The most helpful advice was from my gay doctor, who had asked for a general sexual history to figure out my risks for various infections. “Do you get fucked?” I liked that he used the slang rather than something more clinical like “penetrated.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I find that it kind of hurts.”

  Later, his finger up my ass, checking for warts, lesions, and whatever, he commanded, “Squeeze.” He inserted his finger further and repeated his command. “You need to ask your lover to do this so that your sphincter muscle is exhausted and gets completely relaxed. If you do this, it should be fine, shouldn’t hurt.” Businesslike, he removed his glove and turned away, and I have no doubt that he was giving no more than helpful professional advice with a useful demonstration.

  I have been fucked since then, on various occasions, sometimes more painfully, sometimes more pleasurably. But always with a little discomfort and never for very long. What would it be like to be one of those famed bottoms in porno movies, leaning over (or standing up, or on their back, or on their head, or basically any which way), saying, “Give it to me”?

  So. Give it to me. We haven’t discussed this either. But I want this. I’m gagging for it. My anus is puckering like a kiss, and I’m thinking that you’re the one. This is it. You inside of me, and me feeling better than I’ve ever felt before.

  Poppers give me a headache, and god, they smell bad but they work. Dizzy. Heart beating faster. Sometimes a headache the next day. To avoid that, I take an empty small brown bottle and run it over your skin, capturing your sweat and spit in it, the remains of your day, until I have my own personalized vapor. There’s cologne in there too, musky and sweet. I think it’s going to have a Japanese name, but you say, No, it’s something that’s hard to get. But I’ve got it now, and as I close one nostril with my finger, put the bottle to the other, and inhale deeply, there’s a chemical effect that burns my skin. My head is pounding. I want you in, in, in.

  Your cock is long, not particularly thick, beautifully proportioned, and slick with moisture. We smother it in the finest oils and grab a condom, one of the new-technology ones that don’t need water-based lube. It makes a strange, crinkly sound, but that’s OK, it’s so thin that it’s like a layer of skin, like a spray of water that you use to revive yourself from exhaustion. Your cock glows. From what, I don’t know. Heat? Light? My desire? No matter. Fuck me: with all your might.

  You knock at my door. When you enter, there is a moment of sharp pain, sweet rather than sour. It is replaced immediately by a pleasure that storms my thoughts and senses, and suddenly my sphincter is exhausted and relaxed, so at ease that it is lying back at poolside with a tropical cocktail. With a tiny floral-patterned paper umbrella in it. Served by a Norwegian waiter named Olav. Who is naked. The hair on his arms lit up in the sun like a cornfield. Cheekbones like curved fists. A dick of wonder. The drink makes me giddy and I spill it and laugh and laugh.

 

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